So I went and rented this:

Self-powered, huge, mama-jama rototiller. And it still couldn’t cut through the dry, hard-packed soil. I had to park it for a couple of hours while I watered the yard. That worked. I still was having problems getting it to dig in, instead of running away from me, until I figured out there was this little extendible bar between the rotoblades that I needed to lower so that it would actually drag through the soil and slow the machine down and get the blades to catch.

Then it was tutti all the way, as Prof. Peter Schickele says. By supper time, I had tilled the whole circle and raked it flat. It’s still a bit dicey on the far edge, where it dips down the slope, because when you rake tilled soil, all the vegetable matter ends up at the end of your raking, so that whole outside path on the northern side is for the moment a mite spongy.

Anyway, here’s what it looks like:

Those who saw it in person may be able to tell how much more of a plane the surface is now. My main goal was to even out the bone-jarring dip in the southwestern quadrant (to the left in the photo above). That has been accomplished. I’ll decide whether to build up that northern arc to be level with the rest of the yard as I go along.

Next: the excitement of using my new cutting tool thingie to begin cutting the stones for the center circle. Actually, the next exciting thing is to get that huge tiller loaded back into my van. A big thank you to Marc and Galen for providing the extra muscle necessary for that.

It was decided at last night’s Lichtenbergian contemplation of the labyrinth that I would outline the paths instead of paving them. Much easier and cheaper.

It was also suggested that instead of digging a trench into which I would set the stones, I should lay out the labyrinth and then bring in truckloads of new topsoil and just shovel it into the labyrinth, leveling the ground with the stones. I could then plant grass in the new soil.

This morning I removed all the stones except the center. My next step will be to draw the circle on the stones and find someone who can cut those for me.

Then I have to find a topsoil supplier who can get a truck through my carport.

Excelsior.

No work on the actual labyrinth, of course, because I’m waiting for the Lichtenbergians to contemplate and decide how I should proceed.

I did continue reclaiming the brick edging, however, and that led to some surprising results:

You can see the edging clearly here, and even more amazingly, you can see a whole lot more of the yard!

Until this afternoon, the ivy and growth covered everything up to the labyrinth itself. I cleared away five or six wheelbarrows full.

I was just minding my own business, digging up the bricks (behind the tree in the photo), when all of a sudden the next brick, instead of curving to my left and cutting straight towards you in the photograph, headed straight for the ivy.

I sort of liked all the undergrowth and was hesitant to clear it out, but neither did I want to leave all those bricks unclaimed. Finally I decided to go for it and tear everything out.

I discovered ferns that I had planted years ago, still bravely putting out a couple of fronds. I discovered our cat Miranda’s grave. I discovered, as you can see in the photo, that my original layout for the labyrinth cut directly across the outward curve on the left of the photo.

Not a problem, I thought to myself, since my calculations yesterday indicated that the labyrinth would in actuality be smaller. I got out a measuring device to see exactly how much smaller, and that’s when I discovered that, no, actually, my original plans were quite accurate. Feh.

It’s not really a problem. When I begin actually laying the stone, I’ll move the border.

All in all, a lovely day: beautiful weather, and I successfully avoided working on anything important.

I spent yesterday afternoon playing with the labyrinth, laying out some stones to see how to proceed.

On one half, I paved the path. You can see already that it’s going to require a lot of cutting and fitting. I would probably have to acquire a saw capable of cutting curves, since the center is supposed to be a circle. Of course, I could settle for a table saw to make straight cuts, which would be most of the cuts I’d need, then find someone who could make the dozen or so curved cuts for me.

The cost would be unconscionable as well. I can’t really justify spending what I spent on this one pallet three more times. The stones you’ll see in these photos are about half the pallet!

The time factor is negligible. I quite enjoy getting to work on it, and it is certainly Lichtenbergian in its time-wasting potential. So what if it takes me over a year to complete it? It’s not San Simeon, but it will do.

Here’s another shot of the paved paths. There would be a certain grandeur to covering my back yard in 6″ paving stones, to be sure. I’d essentially be creating a patio, wouldn’t I?

It also would be better, as Mike pointed out in comments previously, to have a stone path for barefoot walking. It would be a lot easier to sweep acorns, twigs, and pecans off the stone path than try to get them out of grass or mulch.

You can see in this shot how many curved cuts would be needed over on the center.

Design note #1: See where the outline comes down and stops at the turnaround at the bottom of the photo? In a perfect world, I’d run power under this thing and have an embedded light at the endpoints of the outline, something like a glass sphere lit from underneath. There are four of these endpoints.

Design note #2: Here we are at the center. I spent some time yesterday clearing away debris and vines from the pile of bricks over in the corner of the yard, because it dawned on me what a good design resource they’d be here. Here I’ve placed bricks on the four cardinal lines of the compass. Notice I’ve left the center blank. I’m going to have four more stones there, with a circle cut out. I’ll dig a hole in the center and put a bowl in it, black, maybe blue (yes, with drainage holes). The circle stones will overlap the bowl, and there in the center of the labyrinth we’ll have a nice omphalos. It might be interesting to fill it with water, for example, or to have a candle in it. Again, in a perfect world, we could place lights under the rim.

No matter whether I pave the paths or pave the outline, I’m going to have to have the curved cuts made for the center stones, just because the center has to be round. Why? Because I said so.

Design note #3: I decided I could break up the endless gray path with quick bands of brick.

I could do that every x number of feet, which, given the topology of the path, would look random, or I could do it in some pattern.

At the moment, I’m thinking I’m going to do it on the western axis, those great back-and-forth sweeps that form the visually uninterrupted arc of the top half. (The bottom half gets all tumultuous with switchbacks.)

Even if I don’t pave the paths, I could do the brick inserts in the path as a design thing.

After all I got all the stones laid out, it was still early and I was enjoying being all sweaty and semi-naked in my shorts, so I went to uncover the brick edging around the back of the yard. Didn’t know there was brick edging? That’s because it’s been covered with an inch or so of dirt and over grown with ivy. Like the brick walkway up top, it’s not hard to reclaim, although it’s a little more work than the walkway because I have to get rid of the ivy as well.

Here’s the other half of the labyrinth, where I paved the outline.

There’s a lot that’s appealing about this approach. First, the expanse of green is soothing, although of course in the winter it wouldn’t be green.

Second, it would be dead easy to accomplish. I could rent a trench digger and be done in a couple of days, rather than a year and a half.

Notice how the entire labyrinth will be slightly smaller than my spray-painted guidelines. That was a quick and dirty layout just to see if the whole thing would fit, which it just did, barely. It’s good that it will come in by a foot or two.

Now to the problems with this approach. As I’ve mentioned repeatedly, keeping the path clear would be a bitch. We’d just have to accept that sandals are permissible for barefoot walking.

Getting grass to grow in the back yard has always been tough, although I’ve never really put any concentrated effort into it. Consultation is called for. I know, though, that we’re talking a lot of tilling and amending of soil even to get started. (I’m going to have to till the whole area anyway, in order to level out some of the irregularities.)

Also, with a paved path, mowing the outline would be easy: just follow the outlines, and the mower just scoots along on the path. Mowing the path, however, would be more of a problem, since the lawnmower is wider than the path. I’d have to make sure the whole thing is level, so I could try to mow over the whole thing. My experience with my brick edgers, however, suggest that this doesn’t really work.

Keeping the weeds at bay with paved paths would be easier as well: just spray Round-Up on the paths. Keeping the outlines weed-free would be a lot harder.

So, I have choices to make. Next weekend, perhaps.

On Sunday, I got inspired to uncover the walkway I had created right after we added on to the house. The bricks came from an old coal furnace chimney on the back of the house. I’ve edged my herb garden and all of my plantings with this brick, and I probably ought to go in and dig out the rest of it from under the bamboo and use it in the labyrinth itself.

Anyway, over the last 15 years the walkway had gotten grown over with moss and dirt, so I decided on the spur of the moment to try to recover it. It was a lot easier than I thought: all I had to do was pry up each brick, get the moss off of it, put a little dirt back in the base, and reset the bricks. Presto! New walkway.

Today’s big news is that I went to Home Depot and ordered a pallet of the small square pavers to be delivered on Thursday. That’s nearly 700 pieces, over 3,000 pounds. Cost? Who’s counting?

How far will one pallet go? I have no idea. Using my superior math skills, I’m thinking the four-foot circle at the center is about 12-1/2 sq. ft., which means it will take approximately 50 pavers to cover it.

Let ‘s see. Follow this closely:

• Using my trusty flexible ruler, I discover that the path of my blueprint is app. 138 inches long.
• With 10 squares to the inch (who uses decimal graph paper??), that’s .33 inches per foot on the blueprint.
• That means that the 138 inches length on the blueprint is a 418-foot path.
• It take six pavers for every foot, so that’s 2,509 pavers that I’ll need in the long run.
• With 672 pieces to the pallet, that’s a little under 4 pallets.

Yep, that’s an expensive proposition. But if I spread it out over a year and a half, let’s say, it’s not too unaffordable. Maybe I need to go online to the Home Depot and do their opinion poll and win the $5,000 gift card.

On Monday, Labor Day, I went to my back yard and began tidying up, cutting down shrubberies and generally just taking a hard look at it. I used to joke that I landscaped nine square feet a year back there, only that was true, not a joke. But since I’m not here during the summer, the back yard has gone if not to ruin at least to deshabille.

Long ago I had nice brick edgings, a brick step path, several little plantings, and a garden bench. Now, most of the bricks are under dirt or moss, the plantings have been swallowed up by ivy, and I’d be afraid to sit on the bench.

Still, it is the navel, as it were, of the Lichtenbergian world, so I’ve been thinking about actually turning it into a kind of place… you know, a place.

I’m thinking I want a labyrinth back there.

No, not a maze. A labyrinth. A maze is a puzzle, involving choice and angst. A labyrinth is a single path that arrives at the center through many twists and turns, but you cannot get lost.

This is a labyrinth, the most basic kind, the classic 7-circuit labyrinth. It is what I will be building in my back yard. It’s a left-handed one, since you turn left upon entering it.

The lore of the labyrinth is long and compelling. I won’t go into it all here, only to say that for me it is very compelling indeed. I have built one three times (which is different than building three labyrinths), and the tattoo on my leg is of a Spanish paleolithic rock-carving of this very pattern.

The three I built were all at my school. The first one was the result of an article I had read in one of my magazines, about how hospitals were having these built into their gardens and that there was some evidence to suggest that patients who trod the labyrinth, rather than just walked for their exercise, recovered more quickly. This seemed to true especially for patients who were recovering from brain injuries.

At the time (the late 90s), Newnan Crossing served a population that required a great deal of remediation. For one of the intersessions we did, we were year-round at the time, I had a math teacher challenge his students to build one of these. We got a $1,000 grant from somewhere, I taught them how to draw, and Home Depot came to the school to show the kids their options for ground cover, materials for outlining the pattern, etc. Teams had to come up with a design and a proposal for materials. The motive was for them to learn their multiplication facts, but we would also end with a labyrinth in our courtyard, and I figured that if our kids walked on this thing, hey, like the brain injury patients, it couldn’t hurt, might help.

Here it is, after the kids helped get all those fence rails into place and we had most of the mulch spread out. It had wide paths so that many kids could play in it at once, and it had straight sides because it was cheaper and easier (as you’ll see in its next incarnation.)

This was set in between the two wings of the school. I was very clever, since we were going to be under construction starting that summer, to check the floorplans and make sure we wouldn’t be caught up in the debris. I got it finished on the Sunday before I drove to GHP that summer.

Foolish man. That very week, the principal was horrified to walk out one morning to see the bulldozers tearing it up. There was a walkway being built across the courtyard that was not in the plans we’d been given.

I waited a couple of years before trying again. This time, my brother-in-law Daniel designed and built a four-foot-tall concrete sundial, and we designed a labyrinth to go around that on the new playground.

Here it is. We got the lawn edgers laid out, and I was only halfway through getting them in the ground before I was told that the sundial was dangerous and had to come out.

We moved it to the front of the school, where it still stands and where I use it in my lessons about shadows and the sun with kindgarteners.

Then I was told I had to move the labyrinth itself because playground equipment was going to go there. Again, I had checked before putting it up there.

So I moved it all back to the courtyard and tried again. I had a webpage on my site where I listed the times I would be working on it, and that information went home in the school newsletter, but I never had any help on this version. (Three dads were magnificent in getting the sundial up and going.)

I finally got it done and was waiting for some funding from the PTO for mulch, since I had basically paid for the rest of it myself. Somehow, that was snafu’d as well, and I got home from GHP several summers ago to find it gone. “It was an eyesore and might have been in the way if we had to work on the drains,” it was claimed, even though the butterfly garden on the other end of the courtyard was in total disarray and completely blocked access to the courtyard, and parents came in and put new mulch in the butterfly garden at the same time my labyrinth was being removed. Needless to say, I have not done a great deal of volunteer work for my school since then.

So, it’s been a couple of years since I built one of these, and like the pangs of childbirth, one forgets how much work it is.

This afternoon I laid out my stakes and string and got half of the pattern spray painted onto the ground. I’ll complete the bottom half tomorrow. It was very pleasant: I brought my living room speaker out, plugged my iPhone directly into it, and had Pandora play my New Age station while I worked. I’ve begun placing neat candle holders around the yard, and I lit those as it got dark. Finally, I just lit the fire and imagined the yard as the space I would like for it to be. It’s going to be a haven.

And since I know you’re going to ask, here’s my tattoo: